There are little bits of Mexico in my clothes and in my hair and on my sheets and swirling down my bathtub drain. There are fragments under my daughter's fingernails; more every day that she makes me lay down on the floor so she can pull them off of my back and rub lotion into the empty spaces they leave behind. She calls those spaces my big hurts, and she tells me that I need wotion to make them awl beddhur, but fast before they sting.

She couldn't be more correct.

When the skin rolls off my thighs, this day rolls away with it, this day that burned into my legs and my mind and left me swollen with the heat and the joy that watching my family just simply play filled me with.

As my shoulders heal and the tan lines flake off and fade back to white, the vision of floating beside my son, watching him discover a whole new world he never knew existed, fades with them. The amazement that filled his eyes, that he silently shared with my under water through goggles, amongst schools of fish we couldn't even identify, is fading to white in my mind.

The shorelines on my back are receding into my sides, parting the Red Sea that holds the flood of memories I carried home, heavy on my back, heavier still in my heart. Visions of silliness, echoes of laughter, whispers of contentment, waves of joy, all loose their foothold in the layers of my body they etched themselves into under sunny Pacific skies.

My fingers feel dry around the pen I hold, writing out complicated grocery lists that accommodate the different needs of my different children, and it makes me ache for the days without lists, the days my lap wasn't full of school work and projects and laundry, the days my lap was filled with the only thing I've ever wanted it to be.

My eyes adjust to the grey of fall, surrendering to it the blues and oranges that draped us in the perfect harmonies of nature.

I fight to hold on to those days, those first days in the life of our family simple and sweet. I'm afraid to let them go, to forget the magic that nestled into our skin and burrowed into our bones and left us bronzed and burnt and sore and perfectly content. And then my husband reminds me that the magic only lives if it's a wanting, a retreat we have to return to, and I think he might be right as I listen to my daughter rubbing lotion into my sunburnt, peeling back, telling me it will all be okay, that she will take my hoits away, asking me to not be afwaid. I realize that she's learned empathy, possibly from her days caring for a friend.

And with that I know that I've brought home everything I needed to, that those shores will wait for us to return and refill our cup until it, once again, runneth over.

{I took 1,750 pictures while we were gone. I will be 102 before I get them all edited, but they'll show up here as I get them done.}